Quick Porch Makeover

Back when we started this renovation, we decided to close off the back door to extend our kitchen (giving us more room for cabinets) and replace the dining room windows with a sliding glass door. That was in November of 2015. That left us with a messed up back porch for a while.

Photo of the back door from late April 2017.

During much of the renovation, the back porch was sort of a staging area. I was dreading replacing the cedar shingles and getting them to look natural so that they weren't just put back in there looking like they filled in where the old door and part of the windows used to be. One spring weekend, I finally decided that I'd be better off ripping off the rest of the cedar shingles and replacing them with something else.

Old cedar shingles removed.

New tongue-and-grove cedar planks installed and sliding door trimmed.

It's like a new room!

Backsplashy

I can't believe I have neglected this blog for 16 months! The pictures below are from March and April of 2017. Catch-up time...

I last left you with A Little Venting, and a lot has happened since then. The next step was installing the backsplash tile, which we bought at Best Tile in Shrewsbury. We chose a classic subway tile by Bellavita. Since our counter top is busy, we stuck with one color for the tile, which is a greyish-beige.

Starting point was the center of the range.

Right side of the stove to the refrigerator finished (still need to grout, though).

Need to finish trimming the window!

Window trimmed. Getting there!

Tile's up!

My brother-in-law wired up the under-cabinet lights to a single switch. I bought Halo hardwired/plug-in LED lights from Lowe's.

I also bought LED light strips and transformers from Amazon to illuminate the insides of two of our cabinets with glass doors. Came out pretty nice!

A Little Venting (Finally)

Well, last month, I finally got around to installing the vent hood over the stove. I was getting pretty tired of looking at that hole cut in the wall for the unit, as well as the wire sticking out of the wall. 

Maura decided that she didn't want to have a microwave over the stove, like we used to have, but instead go with a decorative hood with a vented blower and light. I wasn't so sure about that at first, but our designer, Julie, liked the idea and suggested that we go with a drawer microwave in the peninsula. All this adds up to more expense, but we are quite pleased with the choices we made and how they turned out.

Originally, I had purchased a super-duper Broan RMIP33 unit from Lowe's.

It was on the pricey side ($359), and the blower fan wasn't even included. I ended up buying an 850 CFM blower ($499?!) for it. Go big or go home, right? Oh, and then there's the liner ($149). At this point, the hood was going to cost more than the range! I started having second thoughts and figured I should do a little research before installing it. Good thing I did.

Air Flow Requirements 

"To fulfill the local exhaust air flow requirements of modern construction standards, kitchen fans can be run intermittently (occupant-controlled) or continuously. Kitchen fans operated intermittently should have a flow rate of 100 cfm or more, and continuous fans should have a flow rate of 25 cfm. If the fan is set to run continuously and the flow rate is less than 400 cfm, the sound rating should be no more than 3 sones. Exhaust fans operating in excess of 400 cfm must be provided with makeup air systems that will automatically start and operate simultaneously with the exhaust system and provide makeup air at a rate equivalent to the exhaust."

Makeup air system?! Where would I locate this extra fan and ducting, and why would I want to pull air into my house in the middle of the winter? I decided after reading the above that I did not want to get into having to install a makeup air system. I looked at blower options for the Broan RMIP33, and the smaller single fan blower was still 550 CFM.

So I went back to Lowe's and exchanged the RMIP33 for a Whirlpool Convertible Wall-Mounted Range Hood (max blower speed of 400 CFM, and it's included!).

Nice looking unit, but we would be covering up all of it, with the exception of the part of the shroud that covers the exhaust duct over the cabinets. Since this unit is a lot smaller than the original one we picked out, we were excited to have some extra storage space above the stove. The decorative piece that matched the cabinets actually came with the door panels missing. They weren't intended to be functional doors, but I had Joe order hinges for them since I was going to be constructing a cabinet to go above the unit.

Once I drew out my design, the first step was to figure out where exactly the unit would be mounted. I had to figure out the mounting height, based on how high inside the cabinet I wanted the unit to be. Coincidentally, the arch of the glass piece of the range hood matched the arch on the face of the cabinet enclosure. Once I figured that out, I marked up the wall and then measure, cut, and mounted a sheet of thin plywood for the back of the cabinet. I also mounted a small piece below it to bring the bottom of the unit out as far as the top of it.

Next, I had to install some spacers to which I would screw the cabinet walls and hood cover.

Next, attach the cabinet walls.

Then I cut some trim pieces to cover the spaces on either side of the hood cover.

The hood unit mounted pretty easily with four screws.

Next, I had to install the duct work. I also ended up purchasing a small can of dark paint that I used to paint the wall above the glass part of the hood up to what would be the bottom of the cabinet. I decided that this would be easier than tiling up behind the top of the glass.

I had to purchase a 8-to-6-inch reducer so that I could connect to the duct work that was originally intended for a bigger unit. Things ended up fitting together pretty nicely.

I made three shelves out of plywood. The upper one pictured below was for the floor of the cabinet, and the lower one was stained dark to match the cabinets and was really just designed to hide the mounting brackets for the shelf above it if anyone looked up under the hood through the glass. The one that isn't shown below is the top for the cabinet.

Next, I needed to add a couple of strips to either side to give me something to screw into the cabinet sides and the hood cover from the inside.

Hood cover installed and cabinet roof placed on top.

Now, I just had to wait for the cabinet doors to arrive. They were missing from the original shipment.

Floored!

Well, I really would have liked to finish the reno before the holidays, but, as you can see, I didn't. At least the flooring is all done now. I started installing it about a week before Thanksgiving. My new short-term goal was at least to get the dining area and kitchen floor down before the kids got back for Thanksgiving break. We weren't hosting, but our new dining room table and chair set was scheduled to be delivered the Saturday before Thanksgiving, so I wanted to be able to have a sit-down family dinner, at least.

If you recall from my first post (interesting to see what it used to look like), the flooring we purchased way back in the spring of 2015 was Bellawood's Brazilian Pecan from Lumber Liquidators. One thing for sure is that it had plenty of time to acclimate! I also purchased a professional flooring kit from Home Depot, which worked out great. I took Friday off from work and started in the corner of the dining area. Things started off pretty well.

Starting the floor

When I got to the end of the peninsula on the dining room side, I realized that I would have to measure pretty accurately so that I could start laying the flooring in the corner of the kitchen, to the left of the dishwasher, and then end up matching the flooring at the end of the peninsula on the kitchen side. Well, guess what. I ended up with a quarter-inch gap. Ugh! That was at 11:30 on Saturday night. I was so bummed. I knew what I had to do, but I was dreading it. I went to bed.

When we woke up on Sunday morning, I asked Maura what she thought of the floor. She really liked it. Then I showed her the issue I had. I explained that the right thing to do was to pry up all of the flooring I had laid in the kitchen, pull the nails out of each piece, lay it out in the living room in the same pattern, move the first row out a quarter of an inch, and then reinstall it. It actually didn't end up being as bad as it sounds, and the result is that it ended up coming out great after redoing it.

Looks good, but this part had to be redone.

Success wrapping around the peninsula after relaying the kitchen floor.

Here's what it looked like the Monday before Thanksgiving.

After Thanksgiving, my next short-term goal was to get the floor done in the hallway before the kids got back for Christmas break. I knew that this was going to be time consuming because I would have to rip each of the edge pieces and make custom transition pieces for the bathroom, three bedrooms, and basement doorways.

Making progress in the hallway.

I must say that it was nice to finally have a floor back in the hallway because it had been a while since we pulled up the carpet.

From the other direction.

Fast-forward to after the holidays. While the kids were home on break, I continued the flooring into the living room. Our new TV was delivered the week after Christmas, so I hung that on the wall. The piece below it will probably not end up there, but for now it's working.

First shot of the finished floor (still have to paint and trim the attic door).

I installed cement board above the fireplace which will be refinished.

At least we had a spot to hang the Christmas cards!

View from the front entry.

Happy to be done installing the floor!

So, what's left?

• Baseboard heater covers
• Baseboard, sliding door, kitchen window, and attic door trim
• Vent hood for stove
• Kitchen backsplash
• Kitchen cabinet toe kick trim
• Cabinet top trim
• Refinish fireplace
• Living room furniture

Hopefully, I'll be finished by spring. Wish me luck!

Things Are Looking Up!

Well, our renovation celebrated a birthday sometime last month. Yes, we've been at this for over a year now. It's been a long process, but we're pretty pleased with how things are coming out.

With the kitchen cabinets and counters installed, it was time to get to work on the tongue and groove ceiling. We did have some more drywall to finish up, including the ridge beam. We decided to put a fixture for a ceiling fan in the center of the beam.

Drywalling the ridge beam

We also decided that we would update the fireplace by refacing it and extending it up to the roof line. We still haven't picked out what kind of brick or stone we will use on it. Julie, our interior designer recommended that we wait until the flooring is installed so that we can bring home some samples and see what we would like best.

Framing the new fireplace

I had to install the first few rows of the tongue and groove ceiling before I hung the cabinets on the wall because I wouldn't have been able to nail the boards in with the cabinets up. I hung a chain from the pendant fixtures over the counter to see how they would hang. Unfortunately, I had to end up moving them a bit because the last cabinet door would have ended up hitting the light.

 

Well, that's not going to work.

Once the pendant fixtures were relocated, it was time to continue on with the tongue and groove ceiling. What made that challenging is that, since I was dealing with 8- and 16-foot lengths of board, I couldn't do it alone. Thankfully, I had the help of Maura, my neighbor, Eddie, and my friends, Tim and Steve (not all at the same time, but each of them helped at some points).

Things went pretty smoothly since I had purchased a pneumatic brad nailer. It came with the set that I purchased for installing the hardwood flooring. The worst part was doing the cutouts around the light fixtures (18 of them).

Getting back into the groove

Things are starting to take shape.

When we rewired the kitchen, my brother-in-law, Andy, left pigtails under each cabinet for the under-cabinet lighting. I bought the LED units from Lowe's and installed them myself. Since two of our cabinets have glass doors, we wanted to light those, as well. I bought some LED strips and ran them along the inside front edges of the cabinets and tied them in directly to the under-cabinet lights with a couple of transformers that I mounted to the bottom of those cabinets. We really like how the lighting came out, but I'll probably install a dimmer switch.

Under-cabinet (and in-cabinet) lighting

 

Kitchen and dining room ceiling installed!

Once we finished installing the drywall, including the beam, we arranged for Camille and his crew from Plaster & Drywall Systems, Inc. to come back in and plaster the dining area, living room, and beam. Once again, they did a great job for a more than reasonable price. 
 

Plastering completed!

With the plastering done, it was time to move on to the living room ceiling. That went faster than the kitchen and dining room since it wasn't as big. The room is 15'-10" wide, so I was able to use full pieces of the 16-foot tongue and groove boards. No seems in the living room.

And the living room ceiling is done!

You'll also notice that the trim is installed on the kitchen and dining area side and that we have painted the window and door trim white. It's coming together. We have been trying to keep things moving along so that we can get to installing the floor. We were shooting to have done before Thanksgiving, but it will be tight.

Still need to buy and install vent hood fan and backsplash.

Trim finished on kitchen and dining area side

Skylight trimmed and painted

Ceiling fan hung

I was originally thinking of getting a white ceiling fan, but Julie convinced us to get a nice-looking, dark one that would match the cabinets and stand out a little. We bought the Hunter Willowcrest with an 18-inch down-rod. Maura thinks it might be too low, so I might switch the down-rod out to a shorter one.

We're coming into the home stretch now. We still have some painting and trim work to be done in the living room. We're looking forward to getting the flooring installed!